It’s half past five on a damp Thursday morning in Brecon, Powys, and as the sun rises over Pen-y-Fan, the barn at Tylebrythos farm is buzzing with activity.
About 20 ewes lie sleeping in the straw, their newborn lambs bleating around them, while farmer Stella Phillips, 42, helps by bottle-feeding some of the weakest.
As we watch, a ewe – a straggler of the season – goes into labor, shuffling around her pen trying to get comfortable and pushing away other sheep that come near. Half an hour later her lamb is born, and she licks it all off before it stumbles, upright like Bambi.
It all seems so easy. But Phillips says this lambing season has been marred by difficulties, creating one of the worst seasons on record.
“[The sheep] shouldn’t be in this shed at all,” she says. “They should be on the hill fields.
“We have a grass-based system in Wales and we want them to be able to graze there as they should. But the rain was so terrible that that couldn’t possibly happen. We’ve never had a year like this before. It has been a total disaster.”
Wales is of course known for its rain. But statistics from the Met Office show that winters are becoming wetter and milder. Five of the ten wettest years on record occurred in the past decade, with February and March being 60 percent wetter than average.
The impact on the Phillipses’ 200-acre farm was striking. As we take a quad bike tour of their land, it is clear that many of their lush green fields have turned brown with mud, with deep rivets and puddles of water.
This has caused enormous problems for their 650 newborn lambs, which are usually born outside. Some have suffered hypothermia from lying in the wet mud, while others have been struck by joint disease, a bacterial infection that thrives in wet conditions.
Because the weather is so extreme, Phillips, like many Welsh farmers, has taken her lambs to a large shed close to her farm buildings. But this has also caused problems.
“When they are together like this, the animals have a greater chance of contracting diseases,” she says. “We have been affected by a joint disease, which causes the joints to swell, making it impossible for the lambs to suckle.
“We have to treat it with antibiotics, which we don’t like to do. [Antibiotic use is avoided where possible in animals to prevent the drugs entering the food chain, lessening human resistance.] We managed to save most of the affected lambs, but we did lose a few.”
It is not only the unnatural conditions and risk of disease in indoor lambs that are a problem, but also the cost of providing straw for bedding and hay for eating.
Stella’s husband, Andrew, 47, says: “I’m a fifth-generation farmer and I’ve never known anything like this.
“There is a shortage of straw, again because of the bad weather, but we have had to buy it at £160 a tonne, and a bale only lasts a day. We also have to pay for antibiotics, vets and disinfectant.
“It’s not just the lambs. The calves are also inside, because we cannot risk the cows walking across the fields in this weather. They will do too much damage [to the pasture that livestock relies on for food throughout the year].”
Aled Jones, chairman of NFU Cymru, said: “Agriculture is at the mercy of extreme and variable weather patterns.
“This winter and early spring we have experienced a huge amount of rain, which has disrupted farms. Farmers have had difficulty sowing their crops, cattle could not be put on the grass, lambing was very difficult, and this has resulted in huge costs for farmers.
“This consistent wet weather once again underlines the need for the Welsh Government to recognize the strategic importance of domestic food production.”
The milder weather has also led to an increase in Schmallenberg virus (SBV), which occurs when mosquitoes bite ewes in the fall when they are pregnant, causing lambs to be deformed or stillborn.
In January the Phillipses lost dozens of lambs to SBV, while some farms in Wales and England have lost 25 percent of their early flocks to the disease, according to sheep farming organization the National Sheep Association.
A spokesperson said: “The number of lamb losses does not need to be reported so we do not have an exact figure. But we don’t have a vaccine against Schmallenberg and we know it hit hard this year.
“The mild autumn increases mosquito activity for longer, severely affecting lambs born in January.”
Forty miles away in Pendoylan, Vale of Glamorgan, farmer Tom Rees, 35, has also had his worst lambing season ever.
The province has seen 238 percent more rain than last year, leaving many of its fields inundated.
Rees says: “We have born almost a thousand lambs this season. But on our busiest days we had 30 lambs born in the stable and were running out of space. We couldn’t put them outside because it was so wet, so we tried to make cages in every corner.
‘It’s been wet before, but not for this long. It has rained almost every day since last summer.”
Many of his lambs suffered from scours – mainly sheep diarrhea.
He adds: “Many had chafing because it is a warmer environment and they are not airborne. They didn’t go far or move, so they didn’t use the milk they had, so the milk went right through them.
“We lost a few more than normal, but just managed to mitigate it.”
Another farmer, Mathew Isaac from Ynysybwl, 15 miles north of Cardiff, has lost 30 lambs to the weather this year.
But this is not just a situation affecting Wales.
According to Joseph Henry, practicing vet at Black Sheep Farm Health in Rothray, Northumberland, and chairman of the Sheep Veterinary Association, this has been one of the worst years for loss and illness.
He says the problem started in early winter, when the ground was too wet for farmers to feed their grazing sheep supplementary feed, such as pellets, silage and molasses, which farmers transport to the fields every day. “They couldn’t go to the sheep,” he says. “Not on quad bikes or tractors or even walking because it was so muddy.
“So the lack of nutrition meant the colostrum from the ewes [first milk] The levels were low which meant the lambs, especially the twins, were suffering.”
Some had watery mouth, a disease that causes lambs to be lethargic and reluctant to nurse. Others had blue tongue, a bacterial infection that can leave them lame.
He added: “Farmers have done well to reduce antibiotic use in recent years, but this year there has undoubtedly been an increase in infection pressure.
“Lambs sit in the mud or in damp stables, so the bacteria are more common.
“Some farmers I know are reducing their flocks to manage them better, or are thinking of changing their lambing time so that it is later in the year when the weather should be better. But if all farmers start lambing in the summer, which many farmers in Scotland are already doing, this will affect supply.”
A spokesperson for Defra said: “We are acutely aware of the impact that extreme weather can have on the farming community. Since 2015, we have protected over 900,000 hectares of farmland from the impact of flooding, and we are investing £5.6 billion to better protect communities from flooding and coastal erosion.
“We have opened the Farming Recovery Fund, which provides grants of up to £25,000 to eligible farmers to return their land to the condition it was in before the exceptional flooding caused by Storm Henk.
“In addition, our environmental land management programs pay farmers to take actions that reduce the risk of flooding and help their lands adapt to our changing climate.”
Farmers are currently staggering lambing times to provide a stable market for twelve months, but bundling lambs could potentially flood the market, leading to food waste and erratic prices.
Back in Wales, farmers are also looking ahead to what they can do to improve their position next year.
“I invest in drainage so that the fields don’t get so wet,” says Rees. “I should plant crops, but installing drainage is more important. But this obviously costs money in pipe and stone work.”
Meanwhile, the Phillips family have decided to keep their sheep away from the River Usk and other water sources next year, where the risk of mosquitoes is greatest.
As their lambs grow and the weather improves, they will start planting their crops – oats, wheat and barley – which should already be in the ground by now. This will be used to feed their sheep for next winter.
Stella adds: “We rely so much on spring planting, and it’s not even in the ground because it’s been so wet.
“This spring was a disaster, but I’m actually more concerned about next winter’s supplies.
“Our son, who is only eight, recently overheard us talking about all our problems and left a note saying, ‘Please don’t stop farming.’
“It’s heartbreaking. We love this work. But now that the weather is getting wetter and more extreme, everything feels out of our control.”